As I have no experience on admissions committees, I'd like to think that there are differences between quality of references letters, performances in clerkship rotations (which would be objective), and perceived interested in the specialty (research, electives, indicated in LOR, etc), and most importantly in my opinion, quality of the interview (i.e., is this person a sociopath? this person seems to 'get it'?)
What am I missing here? If there's more than enough good candidates then you just rank them all and take who you get?